Uniqueness

Something that I’ve been thinking more about subconsciously/consciously is uniqueness. It’s “obvious” to some extent when said, but it’s hard to understand in different parts of one’s life / at different perspectives unless you experience it or have it already. People are genetically 99.9% similar. I think humans mostly subconsciously or try to consciously be unique. This affects in the decisions I make or some people I think have made. For example, being “fit” in a mostly “unfit” society is a way to be unique. In addition, a lot of things can be boiled down to being unique. For example, being the president of the United States is already very unique and if you were in the president’s shoes, then what makes you stand out among the other past presidents? Will you be remembered for being as great as Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt? Will Biden or Trump be remembered as well as them?

• Please do note that some of these ideas/examples viewed as extreme to some readers. I leave it up to the readers to interpret on their own.
• Some examples I provide are not what I believe in. It is to provide an example that readers may relate to.
• I do not base my entire life around this idea. I believe that it’s an interesting way to view different parts of my own or someone’s life (work, life experience, etc).
• Uniqueness can be phrased in different specific terms - “tryhard”, “looksmaxxing”, nerd, beautiful, intelligent. It can be viewed as negative or positive.
• The “uniqueness” term itself can be viewed as egoistical or competitive (in some toxic way), but I’ll try to not step into that landscape, but it’s very easy to do so. Some people may view some examples as that while my intentions are not.
• I think “uniqueness” is a more neutral word in English that covers many ideas. Perhaps in an another language, there’s a better word.

Now that’s out of way, let’s dive right in :).

Birth

By default, we have different things that separate people

• face
• body
• height
• skin/hair color
• gender (at birth)

These are some things that are difficult to change. Many people are similar in this category and yet, it’s amazing that every person looks different. Nature is pretty cool.

Identity

Some things can become your identity as you grow, especially in the youth years. I believe one’s parents influence one’s development greatly during this time.

• race/culture
• way of living/lifestyle (mostly depends wealth)
• personality (introvert/extrovert, straight-forwardness, etc)
• hobbies/activies (piano, dancing, things you do sometimes for fun)
• “critical thinking” (these are patterns taught to children, children are great observers of the world ~ typically, children do not think actively most of the times and come out with great observations out of nowhere, at least I believe so)

This is difficult to change as well. There’s the common saying of “oh, that’s my identity” in terms of food they ate as child or how one interacts with older folk or their parents. I believe that this is embedded subsciously in one’s mind once people get older (I have no proof of this, I have to back up my claims with research). This has great impact in the next section with possible changes.

Possible changes

These are attributes you have gained as an “adult”/as you age and encounter more of the world beyond listening to a couple of people and blindly following their words and taking them for granted.

• socialness (how you interact with others)
• attractiveness/looks (can change, ex, makeup/gym/dress/body language)
• confidence/ability to say yes or no (can I take on a task even if I don’t know about the unknown)
• finanical stability / can I make/hold money
• emotional (thinking about a problem without a solution)
• critical thinking / problem solving (can I figure out a way to get out of a problem, for example, I lost my airpods, should I buy a new one or I need to find a way to pay off a ticket/student loans, which one would benefit me more, short term, long term, how I use airpods day to day, etc)
• status / judge a book based on its cover (what level/extent am I respected in current society? what level do I respect others? tied to others such as job/position, looks, confidence, etc - how would one interact with a nuclear scientist versus a storefront worker)

These things are difficult to change as well, but it isn’t hard to change. Unlike the above, these do not affect you permenant-wise physically or mentally. These attributes are mendable.

• I consider these attributes mendable, but considering how adults have goals/tasks/problems in mind & upbringing, it can be easy to extremely difficult to change.

Examples

The following provides examples of statements examined under the lens of uniqueness. I will use the example of books in a library. Imagine that you are represented by one single book. No other book is the same as you (similar to what is in a library).

• “These people are so boring”
  • “There’s literally only tech bros in the SF/bay area”
  • The people aren’t unique to you anymore because you have encountered so many of them and can judge a book easily by cover
• “These people aren’t better than me”
  • “People in nyc think they’re so much better than us / they don’t know what new york is really like” (given person living in brooklyn)”
  • You know what type of environment you grew up in your youth (basically what book cover you are) and these other people with other unique backgrounds are trying to take pages from your book / know better than you in the place you grew up in
• “Wow I want be like him/her (looks)”
  • “He has really big arms”
  • “She looks like a kpop star”
  • You want to be part of this book collection, but you have absolutely no clue/take action to how to make a revision to your book to fit in this collection, it’s usually in the moment to make these statements, maybe unconsciously
• “Wow I want to be like him/her (job/personality/actions)
  • “how did he get to a total compensation of 500k”
  • “how did she manage to travel the world AND do her job at the same time?”
  • Again, you want to be like this book collection, but you have no/some clue of what to do and have a bit of motivation to see how to get there (ask a friend, use resources, think a little bit)
• “I could never be …”
  • “You could never be the president of the US”
  • “There’s no way I could lift 500lbs”
  • These are books all the way up on the shelf, that you can’t even reach. One typically just ignores this and mentions this once, but never even considers that is possible.
• “How do you know about that? / Can you explain it to me?”
  • “How does your cat/plant look so healthy? What do you feed it?”
  • “Do you think that large language models will be AGI?”
  • “How do you know that the GPU is limited by memory bandwidth instead of compute?”
  • “What medications will I need to fix my illness?”
  • “How do you fix the pipe leak?”
  • “Oh, do they drive on the same side of the road in your country?”
  • The stuff one knows makes them unique. Typically, this cannot be judged that easily based on a person’s physical apperance, but sometimes it can inferred (doctor with white suit)
• “I’m the only one doing X / Our product does X”
  • “My startup is the only one using LLMs for X…”
  • “My research is on LLMs and improving their reasoning on X…”
  • I think I will be the best selling new york times book. Maybe this will happen. Then I will be seen by everybody.
• “Wow, you finished a triathlon”
  • In the eyes of everyone else, you are amazing and they’ve only met a couple of people who have done.
  • But if you were in a triathlon, you see hundreds of others doing the same thing, participating in the same event.
  • It makes it you think of some things:
  • Are you really that unique? What can you do better.
  • It’s about perspective. Discovery by a child is mundane to an adult typically, for example.
• “I’m a democrat/republication” / “The Bears could never beat the Packers (football teams)”
  • I am part of this group. We’re cool!
  • Your book is classified under the Fiction section in the library, for example.
  • It’s interesting how people tend to group together. I have not done any research on this, but it’s interesting that this appears repeatly in life.

Why it matters

In some ways, uniqueness is more like less of the population has that attribute/book. In another way, uniqueness is the amount of X you see day-to-day. For example, in new york city, you may find the dirtiness shocking if you were a tourist from Japan, but for a typical resident, it is normal.

For example, if you are working on large language models (llms), think about yourself ~ what makes you different from all the other people who are using them? Is there some special knowledge you can use llms in conjuction with? Maybe you’re a consultant and you find that llms work well with your notes! Maybe you know how to prompt well (better than say, 95% of other people).

Thinking in other people shoes, why do you admire from the person, if you care, what advice would you give (what would you do if you were them)

For example, you want to make better higher TC, you find people with “more unique” TC. What path did they take to get higher TC? Did they hop companies or work at a single company? Did they put a lot of effort into their work to get there? Did you have a lot of connections? Did they have a close relationship with their manager?

Opinion

It’s not so much being “unique”. It’s very difficult to be the one and only who has done X. It’s quite often easy to more about being more unique than others in the sense of vast knowledge of different experiences. In that sense, it’s based on the current timeline and the society that we currently live in. It may or may not be biased. For example, there will most likely not be another scientist in my lifetime that will match the status of einstein. Or another baseball legend to Babe Ruth. Or an another weightlifting champion like Arnold Schwarzenegger Those positions/status/etc has been cemented in history. Most people know these people without having to consult google.

Another take is that some uniqueness has a “difficult to achieve” type of bar. Typically, these goals are only made by a certain number of people. It also ideally should not disappear with age. This should be some type of knowledge. Think of certain knowledge in certain very specific fields - cancer research, triathlons (some extent), etc. Typically, these are one person things. This does not mean one should forgo knowledge in other fields - it’s important to be balanced. I think about how many people I meet and how many people who are doing cancer research. I do not know any. How many people do you meet have done triathlons? Why does the government consult researchers rather than college students for medical advice?

I think that the environment impacts your perspective on uniqueness. Let’s start with an obvious example. Imagine if you grew up in the Netherlands, where the average height of men is 6 feet. You feel average in your country, assuming that everyone is probably most likely your height. If you were to go to Japan, you would be very unique (average being 5’7) and some passsages you would have to duck under. Another example is being a woman in a male-dominated field (plumbing) and vice-versa (nursing). Or speedrunning - people who have played the game knows how it difficult it is, others don’t care.

Now take a perspective into knowledge. What you know differeniates you from others. Here’s a too obvious example ~ if you had the knowledge of Einstein, you probably could have create the theory for general relativity. Ok, a realistic example would be a manager versus an associate at a consulting company. What knowledge does a manager know that an associate doesn’t? Now consider a more interesting example. What kind of knowledge does a chip fab researcher or a cancer researcher know? I have some unanswered questions: what makes it “hard” to learn about? Why doesn’t everyone want to do it? We consider it “hard” because not many people do it? Why can’t people learn about it then? Is it because the material is not explained well? Is it not “fun” to do? Is it a respected occupation? I mean I think it is? People don’t talk down about being in those fields. Here’s a simpler comparison in this timeline equalivant with a company: Why hasn’t any company come close to eating a significant market share of NVidia/Microsoft/Google/Apple? Is the product that they make really unique? Or is their approach unique? What’s their secret sauce(s)?

Another thing is that with uniqueness, people typically discuss it at a surface level. For example, we consider Einstein/Oppenheimer/Feymen to be great scientists. Most people state that and leave it at that. But how did they make themselves unique? It did not come from thin air. How many people have read their papers or writings and discussed them? I don’t think I’ve every encountered anyone who has discussed their papers. What difficulties did they have to overcome? Another thing to think about: Were achievements in the past easier or harder to make? The longer in the past one reads about, it may be that seem that the difficult achievements are more to make (given people’s access to resources and what type of resource they had), but also if you flip it, it is easier to show that achievement give the lack of resouces.

I think it’s important to consider this.

Considering everything I’ve stated above, how do I make myself unique? What makes me different than your average software engineer? (I’m in the software engineering field). Everyone wants to say “Hey, I want to be good at my job” or “I’m pretty smart and good at my job” and leave it at that.

Merging of disciplines is interesting. I’ve seen again and again the same thing explained in one field be repeated in another field. For example:

Sometimes people say “oh, he’s so full of himself” or “he’s not special at all”, Sometimes this is jealousy that someone is more unique? Or is it the opposite? That the person they’re talking about is actually an average-joe?

This applies in realisitic understanding of real world things, ranging from anything. You never truly understand the task at hand without being in it. Extremely example: war. Less serious example, sports ~ you have to play the sport to understand it, weight lifting ~ same thing, now to deep understanding of computer science? like scaling? did you work on a project dealing with it? How do you know how truly what problems there are in a database if you’ve never worked in it?

Uniqueness vs hard

Is being unique defined by a hard thing? Most of the times yes, for example the type of work you do. But sometimes it’s physical ~ maybe someone is so beautiful you can’t resist looking at someone

Uniqueness vs world perspective

I am the only american in this town in japan. Makes you think is that is a good unique trait or not. For example, I visited a sushi restaurant owned by an old man in Hakodate, Japan and my friends and I were having a convseration with a couple were there. We asked about foreigners in the area because my friend’s friend was once traveling abroad for a semester in Hakodate. The woman stated that everyone knows that an american lives in the community for a couple of years and they referred to him as “the american” who lives here. Let’s take the positives: everyone knows you and would probably want know more about your background. Maybe positive/negative: people treat you differently (positive: people want to talk to you, negative: people make assumptions about you). negative: You may not integrate well with the community.

Can it be interpreted as being pretensious/cocky/better than others?

Of course it can. And it’s very easy to do so. However, think about it this way (a silly example): if you were a water type pokemon vs a fire type pokemon. You would basically argue that you are unique in the sense that you are that type of pokemon. But you could very easily argue that if you were the fire type pokemon, you are better than the water type pokemon.

The boundaries for such a case can be very slim and it’s very easy to be overconfident in something that you’ve done especially something that you’ve worked on for a long time (say, weightlifters tend to express their opinions in a very aggressive manner - stating that their plan/way of lifting is the ONLY way or the BEST way) It’s difficult to pull back and you become blinded or convince yourself that you’re blind. I think it’s important for one to realize when they’re doing this and to tone it down/maybe even stop. However, I’ve experience this in sometimes an almost subconscious way and it’s hard for me put a brake on the pedal. And I believe that this is the case for most people. For example, when they describe a hobby that they enjoy doing ~ an instrument that they play, rockclimbing techniques, etc. It’s rare for someone to state that they don’t know what they’re doing and what difficulties they’ve experienced to someone who hasn’t done the same activity before.

But on a sidenote to someone who is more experienced, they tend to begin with their hardships. It’s almost comical how frequent this happens and I wonder why that it is the case?

Among the people you know

There could be positive or negative impact on the people you know depending on your uniqueness. Let’s start at the negative notes. If the person does not know you well, he may make an assumption that you are in this state because of 1 or 2 reasons (ex luck, smart, etc). This could be interpreted as judgemental and can easily be interpreted as jealousy. However, if he does know you, he may state that “he worked hard for X, putting many hours into X and faced Y difficulties along the way”.

I believe that unique people who leave great impression or even have others learn/think are those who break convention or do things that people haven’t seen before. Another thing I believe in who are the most unique are those who can teach and advise others and guide people to learn a certain topic in their own interpretation. For example, teaching music to someone and then have that person reason whether or not what they’re playing makes sense. People who are able to do this are able to step into the thought process of others.

Are you more unique than a llm (chatgpt, claude, etc)?

Let’s start with something everyone talks about: jobs If you are a white collar worker (person who works at a desk), can a llm have more knowledge than you at your job? To answer this: ask yourself this - if you were a colleague asking you or a llm for advice on doing X, which would the colleague pick? If the person said the llm without hesitation, well, are you unique in your knowledge? It could be said that a llm can respond quicker, but that would still mean that the person has more initial trust in an llm than you and that it can explain things better than you can. An interesting experiment is to ask people in your workplace if they would ask a llm or a person first. See what percentage of people would choose either. If you want to know my answer, I would pick a llm.

Let’s go with personality, next. Typically, people have bucketized people and their personalities. So how much more unique can you be in that bucket? Can you be so different from a llm? I have no answers here.

So how can you be more unique than a llm (if it matters)? It may matter to white collar jobs (since most data is sourced from the internet) and a person’s livelihood typically depends on working. An answer could be: I have knowledge that it does not have AND cannot come up with (easily, say in a single prompt). A question to you is have you tried to verify that? It’s an interesting exercise - I recommend you to test your own knowledge. Find a problem, answer it. Then ask the llm to solve the problem. And as a bonus, ask someone else the problem and see if they can solve it

Argument against uniqueness

Why do we value uniqueness (fame aspect) so much? We put scientists, politicians and dictators in our books when most people were laborers in history (farmers, etc)? Can’t we relate to these people most in history? Aren’t those the people the people who built society and we can understand how they speak and more closely relate to them? We can understand their struggle way more.

In the end, you aren’t actually unique at all

I think it’s important to realize you aren’t unique (at least to some degree). There are probably at least 10 exact people like you in NYC or the world. (Need to back up claim with at least something) There are almost 8 billion people in the world right now. How many people are probably exactly like you?

Let’s do some calculations ~ Example, Let’s say you have a friend who claims that he deserve a high paying position because he states that he are better than most people at the company and wants to leave. Let’s say he wants a L6/L7 at google. How long does it take and how hard is it?

• Source: levels.fyi

Based on this page, it takes maybe 3 years to go from L3 to L4. Then another 4.5 years to go from L4 to L5. From L5 to L6, the page doesn’t describe, but 9+ years so probably another 2-? years to get to L6 from L5.

Let’s say 90000 total engineers and 12 Google Fellows (L10) and 2 Senior Google Fellows

So what are you competing against?

Using a power model

f(k) = C * k^(-α)

Let’s use our known data points to determine α and C:

For k = 2: f(8) = 12 For k = 1: f(9) = 2

12 / 2 = (8^(-α)) / (9^(-α)) α ≈ 4.2 12 = C * 8^(-4.2) C ≈ 12 * 8^4.2 ≈ 59,026 f(k) = 59,026 * k^(-4.2)

• L6 2180
• L7 659

So out of 90000 engineers, do you think he is most likely better than >95% of engineers? So basically, in the 1/20 engineers you talk to, do you think that he knows overall more than than the 19 other engineers that you’ve talked to? It’s interesting to go through this perspective (at least for me).

Back to the topic ~

Whether or not uniqueness in different ways may matter or may matter to you. If it does affect some of your viewpoints on life, even if the reality is that you are not unique in some aspects, you can strive for uniqueness. Sometimes, it gives purpose. Sometimes, it gives happiness. But be careful, other times, it can be harmful. It is important to important to reflect and focus on what you what to strive to be unique in.